10 Ways to Control Your Hearing Aids With the Apple Watch

Just imagine being able to adjust the volume, treble, and bass on your hearing aids as discretely and effortlessly as checking the time on your wrist. Or imagine fine-tuning your hearing aids for any listening situation without ever having to touch your hearing aids.

Sound too good to be true? A couple of years ago, it was; but with the Apple Watch, hearing aid users are changing the way they engage with their hearing aids.

With Apple’s most personal gadget to date, you can now leave behind your hearing aid remote control at home, your cell phone in your pocket, and your fingers out of your ears. All hearing aid modifications and settings can be accessed from a software program within the watch—meaning you’ll never have to touch your hearing aids or endlessly fumble through your cell phone again.

Here are 10 cool things you can do with your Apple Watch and compatible hearing aids.

1. Abandon the hearing aid remote control

The problem with contemporary hearing aids is that as they come to be smaller, more powerful, and armed with more features, they become harder to handle. This makes a remote control a necessity, but who wants to carry around yet another device?

Even utilizing your cell phone as the remote control can get tedious, but with the Apple Watch, if you want to alter a setting, you just raise your wrist. It can’t get any easier than that.

2. Effortlessly adjust the volume, treble, and bass

Need the hearing aid volume adjusted? No problem, just inconspicuously lift your wrist, tap the hearing aid application on the watch, and swipe your finger to adjust the volume control slider. You can also quickly fine-tune the treble and bass to build the best sound quality in any listening situation.

3. Mute your hearing aids

Situations occur when you don’t want to amplify sound, and with the Apple Watch, you can turn off the hearing aids with the press of a button.

Although we don’t advocate using this feature on your spouse.

4. Create and save custom sound settings

Having a conversation in a restaurant is very different than having one at home; that’s why hearing aids have what are termed “environmental presets,” or settings that enhance sounds in accordance to the environment.

With the Apple Watch, you can conveniently access and switch among presets, changing settings on the fly depending on where you are. And as you make your changes, if there is a specific setting that works especially well, you can save the setting, label it, and access it in the future.

5. Stream music and phone calls

You’re out for a walk and you want to listen to your favorite music album. That would generally require you to remove your hearing aids, but with Apple Watch, you can stream music wirelessly from the watch to your hearing aids. In this regard, your hearing aids have the dual purpose of a sound amplification device and a pair of high-quality earbuds.

Additionally, you can easily answer or forward phone calls right from the watch, as the audio is transmitted wirelessly to your hearing aids not unlike the music.

6. Find your missing hearing aids

We all lose valuable things, like our car keys, and we use up a lot of time trying to find them. But when we lose our hearing aids, it’s not only inconvenient—we risk breaking the device that connects us to sound, which can be distressing.

With the Apple Watch, if you misplace your hearing aids, you can immediately track them down as the watch can detect their specific location and present it on a map.

7. Focus on speech and block out background noise

Most digital hearing aids come with directional microphones and other background-noise eliminating functionality. With the Apple Watch, you have continuous access to these capabilities, with the capacity to narrow the focus in a hectic room, for instance, by tuning in to the person you’re speaking with while filtering the background noise.

8. View your battery and connection status

You no longer have to worry about running out of battery power and being stuck without sound. You can easily monitor your hearing aid battery life directly on the Apple Watch.

9. Make your hearing aids invisible

You can’t actually make your hearing aids invisible with the Apple Watch, but with the appropriate hearing aid, it will appear that way to those around you. The Apple Watch, when combined with a completely-in-the-ear-canal hearing aid, will be totally out of sight. And when you’re altering your hearing aid controls on your watch, people will think you’re checking the time.

10. Control your tinnitus

Sound therapy in the form of music, white noise, or nature sounds can be streamed wirelessly to your hearing aids, and the sounds can be altered to match up with the frequency of your tinnitus—all from the Apple Watch.

Personalize your hearing experience

While the Apple Watch is not compatible with all types of hearing aid, several hearing aid models currently are, and we expect additional models to be made in the future. The Apple Watch is the ideal solution to many of the problems expressed by our patients and enables a degree of interaction and control like never before.